David Price: “this vote presents us with three choices: We can choose between improving and worsening women's health; we can choose…”

“this vote presents us with three choices: We can choose between improving and worsening women's health; we can choose between increasing and decreasing child mortality; and we can choose between preventing and causing more abortions. International family planning programs provide the only medical care many women around the world ever receive. This year those services will help prevent the deaths of as many as 8,000 mothers who die because of the complications in their pregnancies or in childbirth. Family planning services provide health care for children which dramatically increases the chances children will grow up healthy. Having children about 2 years apart in birth date can increase the survival rate by nearly 30 percent. Finally, preventing abortions. With U.S. funding, family planning programs could prevent as many as 4 million unplanned pregnancies this year, which could prevent up to 1.6 million abortions resulting from those pregnancies. Recent studies clearly link providing family planning services and declining abortion rates in Mexico, Colombia, Hungary, Russia, the Central Asian republics. Our job today is to sort through the information and the misinformation and all the ideological pressures surrounding this issue, and to do what we were elected to do, to do the right thing. With this vote we can improve women's health, we can improve children's lives, and we can reduce the number of abortions.”